Chapter 9 7 Bad governance is a sieve

The mixed ratio of honest officials and villains is not a coincidence, but the result of directional selection.Bad governance is like a sieve, weeding out honest officials and selecting villains. [The elimination pattern of the Han Dynasty] One day in February of the second year of Zhongping in the Eastern Han Dynasty (185), the Nangong in the imperial capital Luoyang caught fire.The fire burned for half a month and burned down four palaces including Lingtai and Lecheng.The nineteen ancient poems describe the imperial palace in Luoyang, saying: The two palaces face each other from a distance, and the double gates are more than a hundred feet away.The two palaces are seven miles apart and can be seen from a distance. The two watchtowers in front of the gate are as high as a hundred feet. From this, we can infer the scale of the palace and the huge cost.The fire in the palace disrupted the empire's budget.The emperor wants to build a new house for his family, where will the extra expenses come from?

At this time, the eunuchs Zhang Rang and Zhao Zhong gave the twenty-eight-year-old Han Lingdi an idea.They suggested that the emperor issue an order to pay ten dollars per mu for large and small fields.In addition, when officials at all levels are promoted to office, they must first pay a sum of money for the construction of palaces.Emperor Han Ling readily adopted the suggestions of the two eunuchs.Therefore, before the imperial officials took office, they all had to go to a place called Xiyuan to ask the price and pay the money.This kind of activity looks a lot like selling officials to sell nobles, and it did develop into naked selling officials and nobles later.

Sima Zhi, the prefect of Julu, is a well-known decent man. He received a new appointment and had to pay money before taking office.Because of his clean reputation, he was given a special discount, and he could take office after paying three million yuan.To be fair, the asking price is really not that high.Before 188 AD, the prefects of each county were the highest local administrators, similar in status to the current provincial party secretary and governor.The salary of an official of this level is 2,000 shi per year. According to the market at that time, it would cost 20 million yuan to buy such a high-ranking official, and the money people asked Sima Zhizhi was less than 20% of the current price.But then again, how much is the official monthly salary of the prefect?Converted into copper coins, it is only thirteen thousand.The three million that the emperor asked for was equivalent to Sima Zhi's salary for nineteen years.If there is no discount, the full 20 million yuan will be paid at the original price, which is equivalent to the salary of the eunuchs for 128 years.If you don't search the people, where will this huge sum of money come from?How to fill it?

"Book of the Later Han Dynasty" said that Sima went directly to the imperial edict and said sadly: I can't bear to be the parents of the people, but want to cut off the people to meet the current demanding.So he wrote a letter, saying that he was not in good health, and asked to resign from the appointment.The superiors did not approve, so Sima Zhi had no choice but to go on the road.Walking to Mengjin and approaching the gate of Luoyang, Sima Zhi also made the final decision.He wrote a letter to the emperor, trying his best to state the mistakes of the policy at that time, and told the lessons of ancient and modern misfortunes and failures. After writing, he committed suicide by taking poison.After seeing his suicide note, Emperor Ling of the Han Dynasty suddenly realized his conscience and temporarily stopped collecting money for palace repairs②.Of course, this was only temporary, and soon the emperor's conscience disappeared again.

The money that Emperor Hanling collected from the officials in advance for repairing the palace, together with the income that was later fully developed into selling officials and nobles, is very similar to a contract fee.The emperor sent officials to be officials to collect taxes, manage the people, and pay him wages. This is a very clear bureaucratic system.But the emperor and his staff knew in their hearts: the first tax is light, the second tax is heavy, and the third tax is a bottomless pit.In addition to various formal tax revenues, most local officials also have a small coffers, with a lot of gray or even black income.This is a sum of black and gray money. No one will admit it when you ask, but in fact the amount is not small; it is very difficult to manage, but it is not reconciled to let the subordinates monopolize it.So the emperor adopted the policy of big contracts: If you pay enough for me, the rest is yours, and you will not be allowed to take office if you don't pay.In fact, this is the approval, coercion and distribution of black and gray income.As soon as this policy came out, honest officials who did not accept black money would have to accept it.This is the real situation of Sima Zhi.

Sima Zhi claimed to be a parent official, and he followed Confucian norms.This was originally a formal code of conduct advocated by the government to be followed throughout the country, but the actual requirements of the rulers for officials conflicted too much with these norms. Sima Zhi could not have any other objections except to persuade or resign, otherwise he would be in conflict with the loyal emperor. conflicting demands, he had to poison himself out of the impasse.Such drastic self-elimination is of course rare and less representative.We still need to tell some more ordinary stories, and at the same time, we need to take a closer look at what those people who have paid for the contract alive and kicking will do after they take office.

【Repeat of Ming Dynasty】 In the blink of an eye, more than 1,400 years passed.On the night of March 9th in the twenty-fourth year of Wanli in the Ming Dynasty (1597), the Kunning Palace in the Forbidden City in Beijing caught fire. The fire spread to the Qianqing Palace, and the residences of the emperor and empress were completely burned down.In the second year, the Huangji Hall, Jianji Hall and Zhongji Hall also caught fire and were burned down.So Emperor Wanli encountered the problem of Emperor Hanling again: Where will the extra expenses for building a new house come from?Wanli's solution was to develop the mining industry and increase temporary taxes. He personally arranged for powerful eunuchs to mine mines all over the country, collected mining taxes, shop taxes, merchant taxes, and boat taxes.

Taxation is different from selling officials and nobles. It belongs to the legitimate power of the emperor. Can it be called evil government?It depends on how you say it.According to the modern saying, taxation is the public service fee paid by the common people to the government, which can be used to maintain social order, safeguard national security, and pay the salaries of civil servants, but it cannot be used to build luxury houses for the families of public servants. Therefore, Emperor Wanli raised taxes to build new houses. Bad governance.The ideologies of the imperial system certainly differ on this issue.Who is the emperor?The emperor is the son of heaven, the lord of the people, and the supreme leader in the world.It is only natural for the emperor to collect taxes and fees that have nothing to do with public services, build palaces, villas and tombs for himself, and support the many beauties in the harem and the thousands of eunuchs who serve them.On this point, the common people at that time fully accepted it. Whoever called others belonged to the emperor or the son of heaven, it was the destiny, and ordinary people just paid for it.

However, even an autocratic empire must abide by certain rules.The taxes and fees collected by the empire have included everything from official salaries to harem rouge money, of which the royal family occupies a considerable proportion.For example, after Zhengde and Jiajing, the royal family spent 360,000 taels of silver on food every year, which alone accounted for about one-tenth of the empire's annual silver income.Faced with this type of income and expenditure bills, the common people have honestly paid and settled the bills, you can slowly repair your palace as much as possible.Conversely, the public services you provide are full of counterfeit and shoddy goods, there is no flood control and no disaster relief, thieves are everywhere, and tyrants are rampant. How do you, the emperor, represent the way of heaven?If you don’t dare to be serious with you and return the goods, or even hire someone else, why do you ask the common people to spend extra money to repair the palace for you?This principle, even the imperial officials trained by Confucian classics, knew that it did not make sense, so there were voices of opposition from all over the court, and they demanded that the emperor cancel the mining tax.

Wanli ignored the buzzing of those civil servants at all, and he sent eunuchs to various places to handle the matter.Eunuchs are the emperor's domestic slaves, usually illiterate, unable to read sage books, and have no descendants. They don't care about being responsible for history, future generations, and the world. They have no other responsibilities and obligations except to please the emperor.The amount of tax they need to pay is also a bit contracted: I heard that there is a mine in a certain place, what tax can be levied, and how much money can be obtained, so I patted my chest and took my cronies to do it.It's great if the task is completed, and it's no big deal if it is not completed.It is more common to complete the task but pretend not to complete it, anyway, the emperor can't figure it out.

Chen Feng was an eunuch sent by Wanli to Huguang (now Hunan and Hubei) to collect taxes and mines. In terms of rank, he was only a grade 8 official, equivalent to a department-level cadre, and in terms of power, he could compete with provincial officials.He led a group of cronies who took the initiative to defect to Huguang. According to the "History of the Ming Dynasty", he robbed travel and tyrannized.He also ordered mass digging of graves to find gold.His henchmen are very imposing, dare to break into people's homes in broad daylight, rape women, and some simply plunder women into the official office of the tax supervisor.The local officials inevitably find it hard to understand, and they are not so cooperative with his work, and the local businessmen and people hate him even more. Once, the common people heard that Chen Feng was going from Wuchang to Jingzhou to collect shop tax. Thousands of people gathered on the road to make a noise and throw stones at him.After Chen Feng escaped, he sued the emperor, naming five officials who did not cooperate with him in his work, saying that they had incited the common people to riot.Wanli was originally an emperor who occupied the latrine and didn't shit. He didn't go to work and didn't work. He basically didn't read all the reports for instructions, but he quickly gave instructions to the reports of the slaves.Of the five officials Chen Feng reported, two were arrested and three were withdrawn, and two of them were fourth-rank magistrates. Ordinarily, the situation is already clear, and Chen Feng's background is too big to be offended.But a five-rank qin named Feng Yingjing is not good at it.In the first month of the twenty-ninth year of Wanli, Chen Feng entertained guests with wine, played with rockets, and burned the houses of the common people.The common people flocked to Chen Feng's gate to ask for an explanation. Chen Feng sent troops out to suppress them, killed many common people, and chopped up the corpses of the dead and threw them on the road to frighten the common people. "History of the Ming Dynasty" said that the top supervisory officials in Zhi Keda, governor of Huguang, were silent and did not dare to speak out, but Feng Yingjing went to the emperor to report Chen Feng's complaint.Seeing Feng Yingjing's complaint, Chen Feng also sued Feng Yingjing in turn, saying that he obstructed the emperor's order and bullied the special envoy sent by the emperor.The emperor listened to Chen Feng but not Feng Yingjing, got angry, demoted Feng Yingjing as an official, and transferred him to a remote place.At this time, two supervisory officials who really couldn't stand it jumped out by themselves, one was Nakata Dayi, and the other was Li Yitang, the censor. They asked the emperor to forgive Feng Yingjing, saying that Chen Feng was not good, and that the emperor put the jackal They were sent all over the world to eat good people.The emperor was even angrier, you advised me to spare him, but I refused to forgive him, so he simply ordered Feng Yingjing to be removed from his name. Here, Chen Feng kept sending reports to the emperor. He said that he sent people to Zaoyang to open mines. Wang Zhihan, the magistrate of Zaoyang County, and He Dongru, the governor of Xiangyang, also obstructed the sabotage, and the emperor ordered them to be dismissed.At this time, the important officials in charge of the supervision work, Yang Yingwen jumped out again during the incident, begging the emperor to forgive the three.These people didn't look at the emperor's face, and jumped out one by one, as if they wanted to make the emperor angry.The emperor was also really angry, so he simply sent Jin Yiwei to Wuchang, and arrested all those who Chen had informed to Beijing and put them in prison, and the punishment was escalated again. Feng Yingjing is an upright official. He has a high reputation in the local area to deal with traitors and punish corrupt officials.When Jin Yiwei arrived in Wuchang, the common people heard that Feng Yingjing was going to be arrested, and some people cried bitterly.On the other hand, Chen Feng was triumphant, and he wrote Feng Yingjing's name and crimes in big letters, and posted them in the busy streets.The common people were furious, and tens of thousands of people surrounded Chen Feng's residence. Chen Feng was afraid, so he fled to the palace of King Chu. His six minions did not escape, and were thrown into the Yangtze River by the angry crowd.Some of Jinyiwei were injured by ordinary people.After Chen Feng hid in Chu Palace, he didn't dare to show his face for more than a month, and asked the emperor to let him return to Beijing.When the emperor recalled Chen Feng, this guy looted tens of thousands of gold treasures. Under the escort of heavy soldiers, the boats and carts were connected for miles.When Feng Yingjing was escorted, the common people crowded the car and cried, and the car couldn't move.It was Feng Yingjing himself who was sitting in the prison van in prison clothes and advised the common people not to make trouble. Feng Yingjing and several other officials who obstructed Chen Feng were taken to Beijing, tortured and detained, and released three years later.The magistrate who obstructed the mining was put to death in prison.After Chen Feng returned to Beijing, nothing happened. Two supervisory officials spoke ill of him and were dismissed by the emperor. Chen Feng was just one of the many mine envoys and tax supervisors during the Wanli period. "Ming History" used half a page to list the names of Chen Fengs from all over the place, and Chen Feng was just one of them.And under Chen Feng's feet lay a group of upright officials who had been eliminated by him. Chen Feng, big and small, each led hundreds of gangsters to run rampant, suck marrow and drink blood, and sacrificed to Jin Feng.About one-tenth of what went to the emperor went into their own pockets, and the contract profits were astonishingly high.As a result, the world was in a state of desperation, and people were devastated. 【Orientation selection】 When I first read the above stories, I was always a little skeptical.The thing that makes me suspicious the most is that the mine envoys and tax inspectors are too bad.In my common sense of life, a pure villain is as rare as a pure saint. How come the eunuchs sent by the emperor are all villains?It was too much of a coincidence.I think Chinese history books tend to describe eunuchs and women as disasters, to excuse the emperor or the autocratic system, and I'm afraid I can't believe it all. The last repetition that helped me figure this out was a book describing the rural areas of North China from 1900 to 1942. It told the story of the change of village head in Wudian Village, Liangxiang County, Beijing, in the late Qing Dynasty and early Republican period. ⑤. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, the public affairs of Wudian Village in Liangxiang were handled by a guild composed of village elites. These elites were usually relatively wealthy and educated people with relatively high social prestige.At that time, the tax was very light, and the chief officials often paid it themselves instead of collecting it from the villagers, because they cared more about prestige and status than the little money. Beginning in 1919, warlords competed for territory around Beijing. There were successive battles of Zhiwan and Zhifeng three times. The warlords extorted logistics supplies from villages without restraint.At this time, the village chief, who was unwilling to blackmail the villagers and could not afford to pay himself, began to leave his public office, and those who regarded this position as a means of making money came up.At this time, the two people who came out to be village chiefs were summoned by the county government for corruption and embezzlement of public funds.After being released from prison with compensation, such a person can still continue to be the village head, because no good person is willing to do it. That is to say, when the government levied a large amount of exorbitant taxes, those who cared more about honor withdrew from the positions of village leaders. Such people are people like Sima Zhi.The replacements are usually people who are brave and good at collecting exorbitant taxes, such as Chen Feng.To put it more clearly, a degenerate government, a government that is more and more exploitative and less service-oriented, naturally needs degenerate officials. It needs them to lose their conscience and be cruel, otherwise they will ask you to leave.This is the background of the replacement of Chen Feng and Feng Yingjing in the previous three hundred years, and the background of Sima Zhi's self-elimination in the previous thousand and seven hundred years.In this context, the mixed ratio of honest officials and villains is not a coincidence, but the result of directional selection.Bad governance is like a sieve, weeding out honest officials and selecting villains. 【The Taste of Being a County Magistrate】 In ancient China, the local administrative system consisted of provinces, prefectures, and counties, and the lowest level responsible for administrative functions was the li (village).We have already mentioned the screening situation at the county prefect (equivalent to the province), prefect and village level, and there is still a county level in the middle.During the Wanli period when mining commissioners and tax supervisors were rampant all over the world, Yuan Hongdao, a famous essayist in the history of literature, was serving as the magistrate of Wu County in Suzhou Prefecture. He later resigned on the pretext of illness.In Yuan Hongdao's letters, there are many confessions about his feelings as an official, and he complained endlessly, but it is quite true to read.Through these letters, we can take a look into the inner world of the county officials at that time. Yuan Hongdao wrote: The younger brother's order is extremely ugly and cannot be described.When you meet an official, you are a slave, when you are waiting for a guest, you are a prostitute, when you manage money and grain, you are a granary old man (governing money and grain is to collect taxes. The granary old man is a handyman who collects the imperial grain at the lowest level, and often does some nitpicking and deduction for self-enrichment). (i.e. matchmaker).In one day, everything is warm and cold, and the yin and yang are changing at once, and the evil world in the world is full of experience.Bitter, poisonous. As Wuling, there is no one to return to human reason, and I don't know that there will be darkness and cold and heat.Why?Money and valleys are as numerous as ox hair, human feelings are as vague as wind and shadows, passers-by are like mosquitoes, and officials are as respectful as Yan Lao.Because of his seven-foot body, he was exhausted from running. However, the Shangguan always has a low-key skin, the passer-by always has a smiling face, the bookkeeper always has a strong spirit, and Qian Gu always has a cruel heart.Suffering is suffering, not difficult.There is only a period of right and wrong that has not been witnessed, the invisible turmoil, the blue sea is full of waves, and the blue sea is full of dust, which often makes people unable to avoid it and has nowhere to escape.Difficult, difficult. In Yuan Hongdao's opinion, the role of the magistrate of a majestic county requires his personal character to be as cheap as a slave, to smile like a prostitute, to be cruel to plunder the people, to speak like a matchmaker, and to be patient in dealing with paperwork. , in short, it's an ugly look.Among these ugliness, the cruelty of raiding the people is similar to what Chen Feng and his like did, so I won't say more here.As for serving superior officials and currying favor with passers-by, these are necessary entertainments in the officialdom. In essence, they are the redistribution of benefits after the people are searched, and they are the fat of the people.Who knows who will be rich and who will be rich tomorrow?Cultivating relationships is a normal investment, and not offending others is a necessary insurance.Accompany around, eat two meals together, send some souvenirs, take care of some travel expenses, why do you call him a blood-sucking mosquito?What's more, Wu County has brought people's fat and people to anoint others to get some glory, and Yuan Hongdao can also go to get some glory when others bring him.This is an official network where everyone has to bear responsibilities and obligations. Yuan Hongdao didn't read these rules in the sage books, and he is so full of complaints. I'm afraid he is too idealistic. Yuan Hongdao said that when he was a teenager, looking at officials was like looking at gods, with infinite scenes that he could not imagine.If you really become an official, the taste is not as good as being a scholar. The toil, humiliation and humiliation are a thousand times that of a scholar.He said, it's like a baby seeing a candy man, crying and wanting to eat it, but after taking a bite, he fears that he won't be able to spit it out.This is what it feels like to be an official⑥. Yuan Hongdao feels bookish, which can only represent some people who have been eliminated by the officialdom.In real life, he is afraid of the inexhaustible things. Some people desperately try to pick them out of others' mouths, while others keep their teeth in their mouths and hold them tightly, for fear of being picked away by others.There are people all over the world who are interested in pulling relationships through the back door, flattering people and sharing money. 【Emperor's character】 In fact, neither Han Lingdi nor Wanli himself was an unbelievably vicious devil. One of the greatest joys of Emperor Han Ling was to dress up as a small vendor in the harem, and let the court ladies also dress up as various vendors to do all kinds of business. He put on a small vendor's clothes and went around, sitting in a pretend restaurant and drinking.Later generations of historians took this very seriously, but it seems we can hardly blame him for being a psychopath either.Han Lingdi has a bit of the capitalist character described by Marx, and he can get great pleasure from the proliferation of capital.This is a character that has contributed greatly in the history of mankind.In addition, he is also a person who can be moved, and can temporarily suppress his pleasure for a suicide note by Sima Zhi.The problem is that he became an emperor, a representative of the public interest in name, and such a representative should obviously not take pleasure in collecting the public's wealth.But then again, it is not up to him to decide whether to be emperor or not. Wanli is no pure villain either.Not long after Feng Yingjing was arrested, the emperor was critically ill once, and he summoned the first and assistant ministers to explain the funeral to him. The will dictated by the emperor sounded reasonable.The emperor said: Sir, come to the front.My illness is getting worse every day.I have enjoyed the country for a long time, and I have no regrets.The good son and the good wife are entrusted to the husband, please guide him to be a virtuous king.Regarding the mining tax, I used this expedient measure because the palace was not completed, and now it can be abolished together with Jiangnan weaving and Jiangxi pottery. The internal officials sent out asked them to return to Beijing.The judiciary has also released the long-term prisoner.All the ministers who were convicted for making suggestions were restored to their official positions, and they were approved by Shizhong and Yushi as requested.These are the things I see Mr. It can be seen from this that Wanli knew right from wrong in his heart, but he immediately regretted his illness as soon as he recovered from his illness the next day, and continued to collect his mining tax until he really died eighteen years later.He seems to be a very lazy and lacking self-control, but no one can do anything about his laziness and lack of self-control, and the result is that villains run rampant. Bad government chooses villains, how is bad government itself chosen?Establishing an emperor is like throwing dice, and the emperor's success depends mainly on luck.In terms of the sixteen emperors of the Ming Dynasty, there were only five or six who could not be called evil sieves.Of the nine emperors in the Eastern Han Dynasty, only three were considered evil, which is about the same probability as the evil government of the Ming Dynasty.Most of the evil sieves in the Eastern Han Dynasty, such as Emperor Ling of the Han Dynasty, was still a child when he became the throne, like a blank sheet of paper; Low.The imperial system is very good at cultivating the inevitable weaknesses and defects of ordinary people into national disasters. 【Atrophic foundation】 Finally, it is time to talk about the people who pay taxes. Ming Zhouhui told a short story in "Jinling Trivia".He said that when the mining tax was booming, there was a man named Lu Er who trafficked around Suzhou and made a living by selling lamp grass.In the twenty-eighth year of Wanli, tax officials were like wolves and tigers, no different from robbers blocking the way.The value of Lu Er's lamp grass is only eight taels of silver, and several places levied his tax, and the money levied already accounted for half of it.Walking to Qingshan, the tax collector came again. Lu Er's bag was empty, and he had nothing to do, so he simply took the lamp plant ashore and set it on fire.The author commented: This move can be described as crazy, but the resentment in my heart is exactly like this! I estimate that the local lamp grass planting and sales industry is probably finished.The author also said that heavy taxes have resulted in the unemployment of the people.This is the foundation of bad government and gangsterism, a foundation that dwindles in a cycle of self-destruction. Gu Yingtai, the author of "Records of Ming History", was from the Qing Dynasty. At the end of his account of the mining tax, there is a paragraph of insightful analysis on interest groups.He said: At the beginning, eunuchs were sent because of the mining tax, and later the fate of these eunuchs was linked with the mining tax.In the beginning, the eunuchs were flattered and flattered and asked them to levy mining taxes. Later, when these eunuchs became fat, they made friends with the harem, and their roots became deeper and deeper.That is why the mining tax cannot be easily abolished.From this point of view, historians of the Qing Dynasty have realized that bad governance can cultivate a self-inflated interest group with independent life.This group wins over the emperor's relatives at the highest level to influence the emperor, eliminates dissidents in the officialdom, recruits minions in various places, and sucks fat and fat from the people to expand its living space, replicating itself layer by layer.Wherever it has power, relationships between people have become increasingly incoherent, and policies implemented have increasingly deviated from the declared policies of the Empire. The evil government and the villainous group complement each other, rapidly expanding to a level that the common people cannot bear, and the cycle of a dynasty is coming to an end.When Wanli died, there were still twenty-four years before the end of the cycle.When Emperor Hanling sold his officials to repair the palace, there were only four years left before the date of his brain death, which was actually the Eastern Han Dynasty. Notes: ①See Xun Chuo's Notes on the Forms of the Hundred Officials of the Jin Dynasty at the end of the twenty-eighth chapter of the Book of the Later Han Dynasty. ② Volume 78 of "Book of the Later Han Dynasty", biography of Zhang Rang. ③ "Ming History" volume 193, biographies of eunuchs. ④ Volume 237 of "History of Ming Dynasty", Biography of Feng Yingjing. ⑤ Duara's "Culture, Power and the Country 1900︱Rural North China in 1942", page 165. ⑥ "Yuan Zhonglang's Essays", Writers Publishing House, 1995, pages 75, 84, and 94. ⑦ "History of the Ming Dynasty" Volume 218, Biography of Shen Yiguan.